What are the best practices for conducting root cause analysis after a release failure?

This post seems to focus on release failures related to release to production (as represented by reference to logging and monitoring) versus the full life cycle of a release. Even release to production failures are likely to have a root cause earlier in the release. Monitoring and logging are likely the source of indicators of a failed release to production not the failure itself.

One thing I found useful is collecting as much data and evidence as possible related to the failure, including logs, metrics, user reports and any other relevant information. Use this data to understand what happened leading up to the failure

Impact assessment will result into lesser issues in deployment cycle. Proper documentation like runbooks plays vital role to streamline process.

It will be useful to identify the phase of the release cycle in which this root cause should have been caught. E.g. is it dev escape, test escape etc.

It will be very important to identify the root cause on release process rather than the issues on scope, dev, qa and ops side.

RCA and Lessons learnt session with team post each deployment will help to minimize similar mistakes improving quality of the product.

Lessons learnt session outcomes must be acted upon. and closely monitored. You must not skip regression testing in lower ENVs.

One thing I found helpful during RCA Process was to Monitor and verify the effectiveness of the solutions implemented to ensure that the problem has been completely resolved. It's important to monitor the system for a sufficient period to ensure that the problem does not reoccur and that there are no unintended consequences of the implemented solution is another critical step.

Effectively communicating the results of the root cause analysis (RCA) and the corrective measures taken to address the underlying causes to pertinent stakeholders has proven to be beneficial in promoting transparency within the organization and keeping all parties informed about the measures taken to prevent future incidents.